ABSTRACT
The epic poems were composed for recitation to the simple music of a primitive fiddle, and the lyrics for singing to more complicated tunes, sometimes with refrains, or as a voice and fiddle accompaniment to a dance. The epic, both in France and in Spain, quickly decayed. But its successor, the courtly romance, was already in existence by the time when that manuscript of Roland which has come down to us left the hands of the scribe. This heroic, fantastic, adventurous, sentimental, and digressive kind of tale, which was written in a smooth rhymed verse, appealed first, no doubt, to the court ladies, who in the middle of the twelfth century could pretend to rather more culture than their warring, hunting, and sporting husbands. The 'Matter of Britain', a series of interrelated tales probably emanating from different Celtic sources, Welsh, Irish, and Cornish, had made its first known appearance in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Latin History of the Kings of Britain.
